PERSON
Immanuel Wallerstein
American sociologist (1930–2019), Braudel's most influential intellectual heir, whose world-systems analysis extended the longue durée framework into a theory of the capitalist world-economy that maps with unsettling precision onto the geography of AI infrastructure.
Immanuel Wallerstein was the American sociologist who took Braudel's framework — the longue durée, the three timescales, the distinction between market economy and capitalism — and built from it world-systems analysis: the theory that the modern world is a single integrated capitalist world-economy with a core, semi-periphery, and periphery, structured since the sixteenth century by patterns that persist through every local political upheaval. His four-volume The Modern World-System (1974–2011) is the most direct extension of Braudelian method into sustained analysis of the modern period, and its categories — core/periphery, hegemony cycles, commodity chains — apply to AI infrastructure with uncomfortable precision.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Wallerstein's key move was to shift the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the world-system. Against development economics, which treated each country as an independent case, he insisted that countries are positions in a single global structure: the core extracts surplus from the periphery, the semi-periphery mediates between